The Political Compass

My English teacher quit teaching after Spring Break, but before he left, he mentioned how he disliked the political compass as liberal or leftist (I don't remember which) propaganda (I think the context was he newfound ability to initiate political conversations with impunity). I disagree with this. TBH, we didn't really talk about it that much, he typically likes to say criticisms of society as humor. Thus I can't really dissect his argument/reasoning for his position, so I'll simple explain mine. I think the political compass is good, albeit not perfect.

I think the concept of the political compass is a very scientific view of politics - trying to isolate and classify views of human organization and decision making. This is pretty related to social studies/history as both seek to process large amounts of data (political theories and their intricacies for the former and human history for the latter). In fact, we can think of the axes of the compass as basis vectors of the real vector space of thought. Thus this suggests that beliefs can be quantified. Thus I suppose the fundamental issue is on whether thoughts can be quantified.

I believe it is possible. We can separate human organization into two concentrations, the physical world and the cognitive (paralleling the physical world and free-will). Thus the physical world would consist of beliefs on resource organization, and for cognitive it would be nonverbal interaction with others (social), and verbal interaction (political). Thus it is easy to realize that economic can be separated into state-controlled vs free market along the axes, social as conservative vs progressive/modernist, and political as diffused or concentrated power. This very nearly aligns with the political compass. Therefore I believe that the political compass can accurately categorize human theories on organization.

However, there is one potential flaw in this system and that is free-will. Suppose that in the future some very high free-will being realizes a different axis, and I don't. Consider before the development of economic theories such as the free-market in the age of enlightenment. Before then, economic theory wasn't developed very much. It is plausible that we are like the pre-(age of enlightenment) with respect to some aspect of human organization. This is probably even probable considering the recent developments in the intersection between technology and mankind (it seems like communism was a reaction to industrialization, free-market to colonization technology, etc).